this. triet sometimes the stories are half a page. most of the time they are between one and one and a half pages. just for fun, would you read the first story in the book just to give us an idea? >> guest: bourn of desire -- >> host: bourn of desire. >> guest: life alone, no name, no memory. its have hands but no one to touch. it had a tongue but no one to talk to. life plus one and one was known. than a desire drew his bow. the arrow of the desire split life on the middle, and life was

two. when they caught sight of each other they laughed and when they touched each other and they laughed again. >> host: i think that is a great example. and of course, it made me think of genesis. >> guest: yes, this is sort of, you know, visions are part of real life. dreams and nightmares are part of daily life. >> host: it's one of the most affectionate pieces in the hundreds of pieces, i think you sit someplace there's 600 short stories like this. >> guest: very, very short stories who finally survive after a process of renouncing

sacrificing some of the i think 80850 short stories in the first version. but it was composed as a symphony and so the melodies would have a continued rhythm and some of the stories were so sad they touched my back say and why, why? amihai ugly, and on a knott beautiful unef? am i stupid? why did you sacrifice me? i want to be there. yes, of course i said, i know you want but i can't. i can't. this is a program with mosaics i like to write the there are so

many little short pieces and on and in her love with each one of them but they must create a whole world and then solomon little pieces that i'm sorry -- >> host: you wrote another book called "memory of fire." three, which is a trilogy. i read that in the 1980's, and you do similar things. overtly historical. but the narrative structure is similar. you start out with a kind of genesis. it's all about latin america. >> guest: about america including north america. the americas, because we are america also in the south.

>> host: absolutely. >> guest: the language not so but we are americans. and "memory of fire," yes, i was trying to rescue the collective memory of the americas in three volumes. this was something like 1,000 short stories in three volumes. and this is an ad project because it is the entire world. >> host: it is the entire world and the entire history. i thought of kafka as i was writing this because i have been a fan of kafka, but i think people associate you with more with the great latin american writers and i know this is to be in the same sentence with gabrielle and sosa is daunting, and those are authors who are

household words in the united states. in latin america you are certainly as well-known as they are and what's interesting is all three of you are and journalists and you have this kind of immediacy even though we started out with a peace and we are going to read more pieces that was at the beginning of everything when man meets woman you talk about all of the war, the culture, the development of humankind. the scope is amazing and it's a daunting. i thought we would do a little bit of biography before we go on with the books. of course your name has been in the headlines in the united states because the president of venezuela, chavez, met our president, barack obama and owls

a jester i think of friendship, he gave barack obama this book, "open veins of latin america." he gave it to him i understand in spanish which was a little difficult because obama doesn't read spanish but i think the intention was to give him a book that if he were to read it it would open his eyes about latin america. there was a lot of discussion about that. what must your reaction when you heard that anecdote that chavez had taken your book to barack obama? >> guest: it was a generous act, and i mean it is meant to be, how we as a, young and healthy than the old and sick. well, obviously i was happy about it. but i was quite happy when i was walking. i am a walker as usual in my

neighborhood and on the seashore eduardo, you are selling so well. this was terrible for me. we are living in a world in which each one a fuss is becoming a commodity, and merchandise. it depends if you sell, you don't sell, you are sold, not sold, bought or not thought. >> host: the bbc negative did that to you because they mentioned that after he gave your book to barack obama it rose to number two on the amazon rankings. and i checked it because our originally it was about 57,000. >> guest: far away. >> host: my books are in the 200,000. but they bounce up and down every day. i noticed this week it's around 17,000. so you can be a little bit more

humble when you were -- >> guest: it's not important at all. in her life there are parts of life in which quantity and quality may be closely related but not in literature. you may be very successful in the market or in the quality of your books. it doesn't depend on that. the best-selling author and all of history of the spanish language is a novelist called cory in. he wrote something like 500 or so books like soap operas and sold much more. >> host: really? >> guest: but it doesn't mean too much. >> host: i think it is significant because this book

affected me so much when i was a young man and it turns out that i thought you were such a man of stature or so much greater than me it turns out we are almost the same age. >> guest: the book at the beginning -- i tried to win the prize and it lost perhaps as you reconsider it was not serious enough because at that time and was 1970. left-wing intellectuals used to believe that if he were not boring than you were not serious. to be serious and should be boring and this was not a boring book and i suppose, i don't know. anyway, it was part of this in mexico. it the first year it was a

disaster. nobody bought the book. it was a complete disaster. but later the military dictatorship's became my marketing agent because they burn the the book and so the book got wide publicity thanks to these generous people in uniform. except in uruguay during some months, 546 months they could enter freely in the military presence because the sensor thought it was a textbook on the anatomy, "open veins of latin america," a textbook on an anatomy. after a short period they realized it was not exactly

this. >> host: i want to tell an anecdote that i read the book soon after it came out and my recollection is i had the book with me when i was in chile in 1973 when the military coup overthrew the government of salvador and i stayed on for six years to write about the piano to dictatorship and that book, your book, i think this is a distinction, would have been among the books i had to burn in order to be able to stay in a chilly along with all of the books about the government, the democratically elected socialist president of chile who was overthrown and introduced 17 years of dictatorship by the right-wing pinochet regime.

and that was an amazing experience that for a north american like me books would be wormed and in order to stay in a country you have to purge your library. so i think that is a distinction that the books that were so good that they were threatening to pinochet were the ones that had to be kept here in the memory and not on my bookshelves and doors was among them. >> guest: its not an innocent book. it's clearly guilty, yes. and it is an honor to be guilty. >> host: in that sense. >> guest: from the point of view of military dictatorship like pinochet i don't rule out any one of them. >> host: you have been accused of being a pamphleteer because of that. there is a lot of criticism as a

result which i was offended by because i know the book very well and door work very well and i know it is compelling literature, and yeah. you definitely make your point of view very clear but i wanted to quote from a mexican writer who weighed in on this. he said you can say many things about this colt work of the latin american left that it is manichean, that it is extremist, that it distorts or exaggerates, but nobody that reads it comes out on affected and the spanish word walls in deming. and i think that is absolutely true when you start reading this book or this book, you are carried forward. you are outraged and you learn so much. let's do the biography i said we

would do. you were born in uruguay. what happened at the time the military took over? you were the editor as a young man i read this when i first got involved in latin america. march was a left-wing weekly publication. very famous in latin america at the time. >> guest: perhaps the best and yes, libels in jail for a brief period and then i went to argentina where i began a cultural magazine called "crisis," which was a very successful experience being a cultural magazine. we were selling before i told selling was and most important importantguest -- >> host: it is your survival.

>> guest: usually cultural magazines, and magazine entirely to cultural subjects at that time sold 1,000 copies, the best of cases. and we sold 75,000, 75, 40,000, which proved the evidence that we were in touch with people who were not the usual clients for these sort of things. we were reaching people aside from the usual space where you find them in certain bookstores and this was because we tried to prove in this magazine that culture was not only the production of books or paintings

or plays, but all of the collective expressions of identity and all of the ways people find to communicate to each other. so culture was communion, a sort of communion and that was why the same importance that we gave to an unnamed cullom was also given to the letters from the prisons to the dreams of try drivers in bosses working 15, 20 hours. so we were there according to dreams. when you can sleep, in this

exceptional moments when you sleep we talked to the workers who never saw the sun because they're working time was from 8:00 to 8:00 so the sun was invisible for them except sundays. and this was culture for us. >> host: what years were you in argentina? >> guest: publishing the magazine almost three and a half years, but then i was obliged -- >> host: you were there prior to the years in the two in 1976. >> guest: and some months after but i was obliged to lead uruguay because i didn't want to be in prison and i was obliged

to leave argentina. and i was obliged to go out, to go away. there is a point in which you cannot distinguish the difference between courage and madness. so i was living in such a way i was to be killed. >> host: liben like to bring in some background about that because one of my books is called the condor years of operation and it describes in great detail the period when you were living in argentina and the amazing thing there is no exaggeration in your feeling it was madness to stay on in argentina and at least 22,000 people were killed up the period

particularly after the military coup happened operation condor was to kill people from other countries who sought exile, people like you and i wanted to ask you most of the iroquois and some were killed in this purpose by the regime were actually killed in argentina. more delayed in argentina and -- >> guest: some in uruguay but most of them and argentina. it was like you see in your book, some sort of the common market's of death. latin american countries haven't been able to create a common market in an economy but in repression it was quite successful. >> host: so you must have

known the prominent exiles from uruguay both murdered in this period, 1976. >> guest: but i was in both lists, uruguay and argentina list so stinging there was a suicide. >> host: so it was lucky for all sophos that you got out. [laughter] >> guest: for me it was. >> host: because you continued to write. >> guest: yes i went to spain and barcelona and wrote during the years of exile almost 12 and 13 years. >> host: which other books of yours or translated in english? >> guest: all of them it was written in this period of exiled thanks to the military dictatorship's gave me time to write, it was a very, very difficult experience. all american history in three

volumes have three short stories telling something you could touch. not all ideas, but the human touch of history when it's really alive. >> host: in "mirrors" you create a tapestry of stories. there is a flow from one sometimes you cover a thousand years in a page. other times you go back and forth a little bit. >> guest: but there is a continue tea like we were running not below the earth, below the land. >> host: an underground river.

>> guest: yes, like an underground river. there is some music uniting all these different pieces that may turn into a mess, absolutely crazy but it's not. i hope it's not. they are articulate because they have this free world. >> host: one almost inevitably leads to another. i found that reading "mirrors" sometimes i would start in the middle, just pick it up and started reading and then i would be carried forward. then because i had to prepare for this i read it all the way through but there is always that the -- it's almost like a push rather than a poll and i can't stop. i have to -- the thing i'm reading now makes me read the next little story. how do you create your stories? but i think what we should take a break now and then we'll come

back and talk about that in the second part. >> guest: yes, okay. >> these places remind me of modern cathedrals donors would build wings on hoping they would go to heaven. >> walter kirn would like to see changes to the higher education system. >> i think for example princeton

philosophy should be on the web. i think that these wonderfully concentrated islands of talented and wealth and area addition should be opened up to the larger society and not kept separate which they still are and i can't understand why. >> walter kirn, the under education of an over achiever on q&a. sunday night on c-span. you can also listen on xm satellite retial or download the podcast. >> host: chaim john dinges talking with eduardo galeano and we are talking about his book, "mirrors." eduardo is particularly important in latin america because he has captured the long history of repression and exploitation, immigration and

conquests and has done this in a number of books and that wasn't enough just to talk about latin america. he is now taking on the history of the world with this new book, "mirrors." i wanted as we broke we were talking about your way of putting fees' together. one of the people i guess it was an interview that i read in which you were talking about your way of writing and you used the word -- which is the feeling thinking. >> guest: feel thinking. it is a language, a feeling thinking language able to express the mind and heart. >> host: how do you collect your stories so that you actually have those vignettes of

30 or 40 lines? >> guest: well, trying to unite a part of ourselves, the mind and the heart and the horrors and the marvels of life because if i would be just a writer writing about repression and death and the terrible life of so many people who are leaving this plan met like living in hell than i would be trying reality because reality includes another side. unfortunately each day we have evidence that reality is not only these dark side who may look at, there is also struggle.

>> host: what are your sources? >> guest: reality like for instance i recently a right here in the states. when i was coming the day before i was walking as usual. i am a walker. and i was very sad because my companion, my comrade, my friend, my dog, he was supposed to be a called died and this was the dark side of me. that day, for five days before arriving here, i was feeling that everything was terrible,

and i crossed a little girl who was jumping, perhaps 2-years-old, no more, 2-years-old and she was alone walking and jumping and celebrating life while i was walking with all of my sadness inside mourning morgan and then i realized she was stopping and then walking again and stopping and she stopped each time she was here in birds singing in the trees. and then i looked at her with more attention to see she would stop, hear the birds and applaud. [laughter] and so when she applauded the

birds my inner part still alive, still able to celebrate life, was woken up, and the same happened with the sources of "mirrors" and all the other books i have written since "open veins of latin america." it is a long list of books. i would if you allow me i would read just one text to tell you clearly how one of these 600 stories came to life. it's called the origin of